Epson Perfection 4490 Photo

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Colour sensitivity	Excellent
Resolution	Excellent
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	High quality scans in detail and colour :  from negatives ,slides ,photos etc
Disadvantages:	Slow when set at is highest quality with dust removal

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I’ve just been scanning some favourite photos so I can include them in a digital photo frame for my dad and I thought I’d share some details about this nifty scanner.

It was bought last autumn originally to try to capture pictures from some water damaged negatives. The original photos were destroyed in the fire that led to the water damage. The scanner we had at the time just wasn’t up to the job and the price of paying a specialist to repair the negatives was just absolutely ridiculous.
I did plenty of research prior to purchasing the Epson because we wanted it for such a specialist job and I wanted one that would be suitable for general use once the negatives were restored but you never really know if you’ve got the right thing until you get it home and start using it.

General basics
The Perfection 4490 Photo is a mid-range scanner aimed at photo amateurs and advanced users rather than novices, so it’s neither top of the range but not a budget one either. It costs around £130 and replaced a nasty little thing that came free from PC world with a laptop. It’s quite a good looking silver and black machine which is very quiet in operation, no chugging and clunking like my 2 previous ones and fairly solidly made. It has a slightly domed lid and the lid is great as it will stay open, propped up on its hinges, until you close it... so you can position your slides negatives etc without struggling one handed (and end up getting fingerprints all over the scanner bed if you are anything like me)

Operation basics
Its easy to set up, comes with a quick start sheet so you can get going without ploughing through the manual and it also has big warning stickers to remind you to remove the transport locks before you start it up. In fact you can’t start it without moving the main transport lock as it covers the USB connection port (good for people who never read instructions I’d imagine). The warning sticker also reminds you to install the scanner software prior to connecting the scanner to you PC

In the box you get the scanner, Power adapter, Power cord, USB cable, a CD with a software pack including manual and drivers, a CD with Adobe Photoshop Elements, a quick start guide, and 2 holders for transparencies (slides and negatives). The scanner has built in transparency hood with its own light source for better scans of slides and negatives

All its connectors are at the back of the machine and the buttons for operations are at the front but the on/off button is on the left side and it can be turned completely off when not in use rather than just in standby mode. The front button panel has 4 quick launch buttons which start up the scanning program with presets to send the scanned image to the printer, via e-mail, save as a PDF file or save as an image file

Scanning information
It can up to resolution of 4,800 dpi with 48 bits per pixel colour depth, it also scans at 2,400 dpi which is fine for general scanning but the 4,800 dpi is great for enlargements or if you are going to be working on damaged photos or negatives.

the Epson Scan program offers three scan modes: Full Auto, Home and Professional. You can manually select the desired mode depending on your needs. The interface of the Epson Scan program in Professional and Home modes consists of two parts: a basic settings window and a preview window. You can also set adobe to acquire images from the Epson and fiddle about with it that way. The professional mode is the most versatile allowing you to manipulate more than the other 2 modes but this isn’t necessary for most jobs. the auto setting does just what it says except it won’t put the photo in for you nor press the start button.

The 4490 is equipped with a hardware dust removal technology which they call digital ice and it has two settings: quality or speed. Quality gives the result while the speed is faster (but a bit pointless in my opinion… why do a half assed job all for a few seconds difference?). It also has dust removal software which you can use as an alternative. Neither of these works with photo originals only with negatives or slides. For photo originals though you do have a colour restoration ability .This is a great way to restore natural colours to scans of old faded photographs.

Other bits and bobs
It will scan in text, i.e. the page of a book which it will then convert into a word document, great for those studying. It can also reduce size and enlarge and is great for diagrams. It will also scan straight to a PDF. It can automatically convert negative images to positives, which results in colour balance than scans of printed photos

In my experience
The quality of its scans is excellent. It made a superb job of scanning in the negatives we originally wanted it for although doing a scan at highest quality with dust removal can take up to 20 minutes per image but this is well worth the time. Its general scans though are as quick as the majority of scanners and of very high quality (35 seconds in fully automatic mode and saving directly to JPEG format). The colour restoration is very good and saves a lot of time fiddling about in Photoshop or whatever graphics programme you’d use.

Would I recommend it?
Well yes and no. If you have old photographs, slides or negatives that you want to convert to digital or if you have damaged slides, negatives or photos that you want to repair or if you want to restore or repair photos for other people then yes I would
If you don’t then id’ advise you to get a different scanner, it’s not worth paying for facilities you won’t be using

Epson customer service is good to deal with as ive used them in the past for Printer problems. They dont make you feel a twit when the problem turns out to be yours rather than theirs.
I have noticed though that Epson products seem to work their best when paired with other Epsons